"This is a bit of a poser," suggests the author at one point (and no, it's not that Jeremy Beadle), "as in 1992 the whole KLF label back catalogue was instantaneously deleted." The KLF are, you see, the main plank of Beadle's discussion/argument surrounding the present and future of Modern Pop Music. Or perhaps more correctly, the Illuminatus-inspired, near-legendary Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, alter-egos and precursors to The KLF, and their brief, explosive assault upon the music industry circa 1987-1988.

'All You Need Is Love', with its razor-sharp beats, Clyde-side Rap, and cries of "Shag! Shag! Shag!" and "Testify!", crash-landed in a white-label flurry, the 500 copies unavailable almost before they touched base. Oh, and illegal, thanks to undisguised cut-ups of The MC5, The Beatles and Samantha Fox among others: 'All You Need Is Love' flagged the arrival of sampling as arguably the pre-eminent creative groove since the ephemeral hey-day of punk in the late 70s. That piggy-bank emptying 12" was shadowed by the LP 1987 What The Fuck Is Going On? - "the aural equivalent of a Blue Peter time capsule that's been compiled by the Val Singleton Youth Branch of Baader Meinhof," claimed one reviewer, with its appropriation of Top Of The Pops, The Monkees, Sex Pistols and Dave Brubeck - which although slightly more visible (i.e. you could actually buy it) was hardly any more enduring, liquidated in a legal-action from a heavily sampled Abba.

In a sense Beadle's thesis has it easy here - he discusses and dissects these records in loving detail, confident in the knowledge that few enough have heard them to take issue, the resulting discourse being both illuminating, curiously non-committal, and worse, occasionally ill-informed. (The sampled voice intoning "sexual intercourse" and "no known cure" is "evidently lifted from some documentary source" as opposed to the obvious, infamous initial government AIDS film. Similarly, he avoids any discussion of the reissued, recut pressing of the LP that omitted all the samples, replacing them with silence and written DIY instructions).

The JAMs died soon after their second LP, the spectacular success (a Number 1) of the calculated novelty-pop of The Timelords' Doctorin' the Tardis (Sweet meets Glitter-stomp meets Dr Who) and The Manual, a step-by-step guide to hitdom that actually gave Edelweiss their little-recalled hit single 'Bring Me Edelweiss'. Despite being "both funny and...pretty accurate", and embodying sampling philosophy, Beadle is rather dismissive.

Which is not to say that Will Pop Eat Itself? is simply a potted history of the Bill Drummond/Jimmy Cauty partnership, but it is one major axis, juxtaposing the even more brief career of the loose (and legend has it combustible) musical coalition of M/A/R/R/S, wherein 4AD label ambient-rockers A.R. Kane and the more dancefloorist Colourbox sampled their way to chart glory with the seminal 'Pump Up The Volume'. "There isn't much point in staging an artistic revolution if no one notices," says Beadle, arguing that what The JAMs were doing (more subversively) underground, M/A/R/R/S were doing in the full-glare of Top Of The Pops and legal-action from a sampled Stock, Aitken and Waterman. The difference between this and the surface-similar magpie approach of The JAMs was, he urges, in the deliberate socio-political (albeit humorous) commentary of the latter where context and origin of samples is all (coming to some kind of a head on The KLF's extraordinary - and curiously unmentioned - Gulf War commentary 'America No More'), to the former's deliberate absorption of those elements in a thrust towards a musical homogeneity.

It's this record that, Beadle asserts, has had an incalculable effect on contemporary dance and pop, maintaining the direct lineage of Bomb the Bass's almost equally seminal 'Beat Dis', S-Express, Coldcut and the explosion in House/Rave. Beadle's argument is essentially that all culture is self-referential, even self-consuming, and that far from being viewed as illegal or immoral, invention and wit in the sacking of others should be celebrated, be it The Waste Land and Ulysses, or 'Pump Up The Volume' and The JAMs' 'Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)'.

The argument is leisurely and non-academic, and one that sees no disgrace in debating Das Rheingold in the same chapter as 'Da Doo Ron Ron'. Beadle's tone is largely conversational, tracing the history of early classical recording and the birth of the concept of the record producer, through to the arrival of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and, to a lesser extent, Motown, when the groups themselves were suddenly largely subservient to the notion of the producer as artist. The trail leads through Rap and the electronic-keyboard groups of the early 80s (Heaven 17, Human League, Soft Cell, et al) and on to the revolution of sampling technology itself. Beadle's style is a curious one, however, one which even allows an entire chapter to his own flirtations in the studio - Psychoporridge - which exists solely on paper as far as the reader is concerned and as such offers little weight in the overall scheme of things. Elsewhere it allows a note of heavily opinionated (and welcome) humour to creep in - "It's curious," he writes, "that two of the poorest chart years ever should conclude with (Queen's) 'Bohemian Rhapsody' at Number 1," and lambasts (MC) Hammer's sampling as "vacuous" (but not before drawing comparisons between Hammer and Prince, Rembrandt and Titian).

Beadle's major error of judgement, beyond possibly overloading retrospective cultural significance, is in his ultimate dismissal of contemporary pop music. While he goes someway towards the (fashionable and justified) defence of Kylie Minogue - "all set in the real province and domain of good pop music" - he is elsewhere dismissive of the bulk of the SAW catalogue, and of the necessity of pure teeny-pop as currently embodied by the hard bodies of Take That, leaving one to wonder whether many of the band's fans (teenage girls and the Gay clubs that supported the lean years) do not have a better handle on the pop-process than this self-appointed historian/theorist. "Pop music," he tells us, "is going around in an ever-decreasing circle which remains unchallenged. Pop is always eating itself, but it seems to be producing the inevitable kind of waste as a result."

With some justification he tells us that perhaps, "the most dreadful event (of 1992) was the relative success of Tubular Bells II" (avoiding mention that Ambient sampling-darlings The Orb were brought in to remix this aural-atrocity), then spectacularly lets the side down by citing REM's defiantly conventional Automatic For The People as "the single most imaginative piece of work in the rock/pop world in 1992." We all, it seems, grow old eventually.